[OH-Dev] Amazing PyCon sprints

Fri Mar 16 00:40:36 UTC 2012

Great write up Asheesh, I hope this makes it to the OpenHatch blog.
Thank you for all the help at sprints (allllll the help) and an intro to
vegan food :)

And thank you Jessica and Ned for encouraging people to go to PyCon, I
think
I'll be back.

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 7:57 PM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The PyCon sprints have been amazing. I'm typing here toward the end of
> them, and I just wanted to write a brief report of how great things have
> been.
>
> Here's how things looked on Monday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/**
> paulproteus/6839832732/in/**photostream/<http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulproteus/6839832732/in/photostream/>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/**paulproteus/6839835602/in/**photostream/<http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulproteus/6839835602/in/photostream/>
>
> And, for those who like words:
>
> * Portia, a new contributor, submitted a patch to improve the quality of
> the git training mission.
>
> * Jacquie, whose first commit landed in Janaury 2012, stayed to sprint on
> improving the quality of the training missions, moving them toward
> class-based views. This also meant learning a lot about git branches and
> Github.
>
> * Berry Phillips started (and probably completed, pending review) the long
> slog of extracting the OpenHatch bug download+parse code into a separate
> Python package. Having seen the deep inside of OpenHatch, he will probably
> spend a bunch of his future time on the frontend. (-:
>
> * John Morrison wrote new code that integrates with the Github API to
> download issue data from there. This, once merged, will make it possible
> for users of Github Issues to automatically add their bitesize bugs to
> OpenHatch's volunteer opportunity finder.
>
> * Karen Rustad fixed crucial design issues with the redesign that I missed
> when I deployed the redesign, and also created (and got feedback on) a
> mockup for how openhatch.org/search/ can meaningfully show projects, not
> just individual bugs, for new contributors.
>
> * Russia submitted her first patch, moving patch.py from
> mysite/missions/base/ into the vendor/ directory. She also experimented
> with Github pull requests, and is interested in solving another ticket.
>
> * Walker Hale IV identified two fundamental issues with the data
> import/export system, and submitted patches+email conversations that
> addressed most of them. Jenkins' builder for the search app is still
> failing; further patches to finish the issues are forthcoming. He also
> repeatedly answered the question for other PyCon attendees, "What is
> OpenHatch?"
>
> * Daniel Mizyrycki got to know our documentation and auto-builders. He was
> particularly enthused by Karen's talk on documentation, and how it can be
> built in a way that does not repeat oneself. We now have Sphinx
> documentation directly due to him.
>
> * Pam Selle submitted fixes for various important layout problems, some
> which were as bad as CSS syntax errors and missing close-tags on our HTML.
>
> * Asheesh managed to not just mentor new contributors but also write some
> code that is a sketch of how we can improve the bug downloading code, via
> removing a lot of our bookkeeping on top of Twisted, and showing that to
> John, who might be able to run with it.
>
> Pam and Walker led the battle cry to ask me to accept patches as Github
> pull requests, which I succumbed to.
>
> We all made a video of the sprint, and a photo was snapped also. I don't
> know where the video is, but the photo is linked-to at the top of this
> email post!
>
> In terms of users of the site, and interest in the project,
>
> * glyph (of Twisted) asked if we had implemented a workflow for handing
> new contributors to his project. I was happy to say yes, thanks to Jule
> Slootbeek's work on the backend a few months ago.
>
> * One new user went through the training missions and learned a lot about
> command-line tools on his Ubuntu machine in the process.
>
> This was astounding. We had nine people (plus me, makes 10) here at the
> Sprints who have made meaningful contributions to the code. And their
> (y'all's!) enthusiasm for the project is what will push it to new
> directions.
>
> I think that a few things made this such as success:
>
> * I prepared (during the start of the sprint, as well as I could) to list
> some good issues for newcomers.
>
> * I asked people at the beginning of the sprint what their backgrounds
> are, and aimed to come up with tasks targeted at them.
>
> * Pam showed up in the middle, adding one to our contributor count, and
> also encouraged us to have a group dinner. (-:
>
> * People's willingness to ask questions. This could have been even better
> -- I suppose even more maintainers in attendance would have been great. New
> contributors did chat a lot with each other, so I wasn't always a
> bottleneck, which is great.
>
> * Dramatically more reliable setup instructions for getting a development
> environment going, compared to one year ago.
>
> So -- thanks to all who sprinted, and to all over the years who've worked
> to give us such a great project to sprint on!
>
> -- Asheesh.
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-- 
“The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn,
the more places you'll go.” -Dr. Seuss
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